Last weekend, the men from our church had a massive service project over at Burnet hollow.  Over 20 kind hearted handymen showed up to help build and re-build the Beorningstead and Jonathan's new house.  Early in the course of the work atthe Beorningstead, it was discovered that there is NO insulation in the walls at all.


Um.  .  .  .


Everyone said that the house has always been warm and there are three layers of siding on the front of the house and there is a huge amount of airspace between the inner walls and the outer walls but. . .   I like to be warm.  I hate being cold. We need to re-wire the whole house.  A few moments of furrowed eyebrows and painful deliberating and we decided to just gut the downstairs.


Ouch.  We didn't figure insulation and wall board for every room downstairs into our calculations.  BUT come wintertime, I really won't mind if I have to build the fire 4 or 5 times a ay instead of 6 or 8.  That will be O.K. with me. It might even make up for the ouch in the budget a bit plus the wiring will go a lot faster this way.

I'm right, Right?



In our ripping and tearing we have discovered an interesting thing about Amish construction.  We know that they are supposed to live very simply, no extra frills - nothing fancy, you know.    This means that they don't use screws.  Everything is held together with nails.  They also don't really believe in installing hooks for hanging things from.  Instead, they simply pound nails in wherever they might need to hang anything.  Lots of nails.  The bigger the nail, the better.  yesterday, i pulled out a lot of nails at shoulder, head and hip height because we were all getting tired of leaning up against a wall and getting impaled or getting gouged in the pants while carrying an akward piece of tubing.  I pulled at least 40 nails out of various places in the house.  There's still one massive nail - I mean railroad spike- pounded in high up on the wall in my studio.  I'm afraid if I pull it out, the whole back side of the house will come down.

I left these in, too.  This shelf unit is in my new studio, which was Barbara's kitchen.  I might be keeping this shelf - it is at a good height and will be a great place to hang measuring cups, spoons and funnels - which is what she used it for, too.

Molly took some awesome photos of the hayloft yesterday, too.  iif she gets her other work done, I'll help her put up her first post this evening so you all can see.

We've been waiting a long time for this!

Our dream has always been to live right up close with family with enough land for a cow and some other livestock. This spring, that dream began to look like a real possibility.

The house the Bryan's Uncle lived in while Bry and his siblings were young was bought by an Amish family several years ago. Last year the Amish decided to sell in order to move closer to the wife's family. For a while we hoped that Bry's sister, Molly, would buy the place and move back to St. Lawrence County with her crew but the timing just wasn't quite right for them. Though Bryan had always loved that house and the property, we didn't even think about it for ourselves at that point but this spring the Amish split the propety, offering the house and outbuildings on 2 acres for an incredibly low price.

Of course, the plumbing and wiring have been removed and things are in quite a bit of disorder but the septic is sturdy, the well is clean and the land adjoins Gramma and Grampa's house. We discovered that, with a little boost from family and doing all the manual labor ourselves, we could fix the old house up and live where we really want to live for about the same price as our current mortgage. Because Gramma and Grampa live two houses down and Uncle Jonathan and his family will live across the road, we've decided that we'll call our new home the Beorningstead down in Burnett hollow.

The process of securing a mortgage for the Beorningstead has been arduous, since BOCES cuts have set Bry back to working part time but our commitment letter finally came a few weeks ago. We have been doing some small projects with the permission of the owner while waiting for our closing date. We are hoping to get moved in before snow flies!

This blog will be about the process of renovating the house, repairing the barns and putting this little old farm to work again.